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Tuesday afternoon, I sat down with J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade, to talk about how investors can use options, particularly as a less expensive way to get exposure to high-priced stocks like Apple, Priceline or Chipotle:

Apple is off to a rip-roaring start Wednesday. After yet another blockbuster earnings report the iPhone-maker is quickly erasing memories of the selloff that struck after shares hit a fresh all-time high at $644 April 10, leaping $50.60, or 9%, to $610.88 in the first few hours of trading.

The slide before Tuesday's report was a confounding one for many investors. Did Apple shares decline just because a months-long rally needed a breather? Were the concerns about disappointing iPhone sales dashed for good with more than 35 million units sold in the quarter?

For some market watchers, the debate over Apple is purely academic, since tying up a significant portion of their portfolios in a stock that costs several hundred dollars is untenable, even if the underlying valuation is inexpensive. There is another road aside from just purchasing the equity though, as options provide a chance to get exposure without breaking the bank to buy shares.

J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade, says that Apple has been great for him as a means to educate investors about options strategies, like bullish call spreads (buying a call at one price and selling a call at a higher price) that can allow for participation in upside but also clearly define risk.

In Apple for instance, investors could buy in-the-money calls (with strike prices below the stock price at the time of purchase) and sell out-of-the-money calls, locking in the spread or the range in which shares need to trade for the strategy to be profitable. The cost of doing so, while more expensive than it would be for a lower-priced stock, is far below that of purchasing the shares.

It isn’t just Apple either. Many popular stocks -- from Priceline to Chipotle to Google to MasterCard -- change hands for prices in the hundreds. At these lofty prices it is tough for many individual investors to pick up a couple hundred shares, regardless of whether the fundamentals look attractive.

(A quick aside: investing in options is a strategy that can be very useful for many stripes of investors. It's not a substitute for the same type of homework and analysis one should do before going long or short a stock outright.)

While those high-priced names make for good options examples, the opportunity to use such strategies is by no means limited to the pricey cohort. Kinahan says that options can be a good way to define risk (there’s that term again) during earnings season, when quarterly numbers are often a key, volatile inflection point for a stock. Just have a look at a Citigroup chart from April 16, when shares were all over the place after Q1 results confused investors.

Speaking of volatility, Kinahan also thinks investors are well served to consider longer-term options as a way to “volatility-cost average” in much the same way they might use dollar-cost averaging to get into a stock they like. By, for instance, selling calls with May, June and July expiration, an investor can “get the average volatility on that stock…rather than trying to pick highs and lows,” he says, “which we know can be very difficult.”

For more from J.J., watch the video above, or at this link, and be sure to check back at Forbes, where he will soon be contributing regular posts to educate investors on options strategies for all kinds of markets.